Jonah Goldberg: Liberals confuse normalcy with fascism

“If history were to repeat itself,” warned
President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union address, “and we
were to return to the so-called normalcy of the 1920s, then it is certain that even
though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall
have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home.”

The
“normalcy” of the 1920s that Roosevelt referred to was a time of peace and
prosperity. The decade began with Republican President Warren Harding commuting
the sentences of political prisoners jailed by the Wilson administration,
including the socialist leader Eugene Debs.

“Normalcy”
meant the end to the Palmer raids aimed at rooting out dissidents, the end of
economic rationing, the cessation of domestic surveillance and the state
propaganda of the World War I years.

Also, “A
return to normalcy” was Harding’s campaign slogan in the 1920 presidential
election, which he won in a landslide over Democrat James Cox and his running
mate — Franklin D. Roosevelt.

That
Roosevelt nurtured resentments against the Republicans for the drubbing he
received in 1920 is no surprise. That those resentments ran deep enough for him
to smear Republicans in 1944 with the “spirit of fascism” at the height of the
war against the real thing is nothing short of disgusting.

But it
was effective.

When a
communist assassinated President Kennedy, somehow the American right got the
blame. Lyndon Johnson translated that myth into a campaign of slander against
Barry Goldwater, casting him as a crypto-Nazi emissary of “hate.”

After the
Oklahoma City bombing, President Clinton saw fit to insinuate that Rush
Limbaugh and his imitators were partly to blame.

Such
partisanship is hardly reserved for partisans. The late Daniel Schorr, then of
CBS News, reported that Goldwater’s planned European vacation was really a
rendezvous with the German right in “Hitler’s onetime stomping ground.”

Schorr
spent his golden years at National Public Radio. No doubt he would have been
pleased with the “reporting” of its counterterrorism correspondent, Dina
Temple-Raston. Before the identities of the Boston bombers were confirmed, she
said her sources were “leaning” toward believing that it was a homegrown
“right-wing” attack, and cited that “April is a big month for anti-government
and right-wing individuals.”

How so?
Well, because April’s when the Oklahoma City bombing took place, as well as the
Waco siege and, how could one forget, Adolf Hitler’s birthday.

Over the
last few years, the invariably unjustified rush to pin violence on the “right
wing” — particularly the tea partiers — has reached the point of parody.
Remember when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg speculated that the foiled
Times Square bomber might just be angry about Obamacare?

As the Washington
Examiner’s Philip Klein recently noted, among the myriad reasons
conservatives take offense at this idiotic knee-jerk slander is that the term
“right wing” is also routinely used to describe both terrorists and mainstream
Republicans such as Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney.

Every
Muslim terrorist enjoys not just the presumption of innocence until proven
guilty but the presumption that he’s a fan of Ayn Rand, too.

Ah, but
some would respond that “right wing” is different than “Muslim” because there’s
so much similarity between mainstream conservative ideology and the
terror-filled creeds of the far right.

Except
there isn’t. Timothy McVeigh, an atheist, wasn’t part of the conservative or
libertarian movements.

In plenty
of cases of multiple killings, from the Unabomber to Christopher Dorner, the
perpetrators espoused views closer to the mainstream left’s than McVeigh had to
the mainstream right.

And,
recall that Secretary of State John Kerry belonged to a group — Vietnam Veterans
Against the War — that once discussed assassinating American politicians.
Barack Obama was friendly with a convicted domestic terrorist. But to even
bring these things up is considered outrageous guilt by association. But if
that is outrageous, what do you call the paranoid style of liberal politics
that has confused normalcy for fascism for more than half a century?

JONAH GOLDBERG is editor-at-large of National
Review Online. His column is distributed by Tribune Media Services Inc.

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